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The Sorting Hat

We are going to play a matching game aimed at teaching you intuition. The same kind of games used to teach people to identify chickens when they are young, or teach actually pigeons to detect cancer from MRI slides.

Come learn how to learn taste and see the patterns only your subconscious can detect.

Outline/Structure of the Demonstration

This is an odd session. It basically consists of me showing training sets (200 slides in 3 minutes) while the audience yells out yes/no answers to classify different types of things (sparrows, code smells, cynefin patterns, user stories, etc...) The brain is really really good at detecting patterns, so not much talking from my side. I then have them do it again, but this time solo on their through a phone app I created. This structure repeats for each training set.

note: I presented this at agile games west to great success. It can also be adapted to longer format if desired

Public Feedback

paint me intrigued ... "teach people to identify chickens when they are young" why are we having to teach people to identify chickens - and who exactly is young the chicken or the people - does that matter to a proper sorting hat?

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Keynote

Beginner

The winds of Agile change are blowing – occasionally a tornado bringing dramatic, sometimes unexpected change, and other times a gentle breeze that changes little. While you can’t control the weather, you can shape the climate around your team. A team’s climate profoundly impacts engagement, collaboration and results. AND it is something a team can co-create for itself – irrespective of the organization’s core culture.

In this interactive session, we will explore what an Agile climate is, how Agilists anywhere can influence it and the role that Agile games can play in fostering an awesome Agile climate, no matter what culture storms may be brewing beyond the team.

toddcharron - Status and Power Improv

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

schedule 2 years ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Have you heard about Design Thinking but unsure about where it all fits in with all these other buzzwords like Lean UX and Agile? Get your learn on with this creative journey through the lens of a dinner party.

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

schedule 2 years ago

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180 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Want an awesome team that builds great products? Great teams don’t happen by accident. And they don’t have to take a long time to build.

In this session, Richard lays out the case for Continuous Teaming. Session participants will join in a flight of fun learning activity-sets. These will give you a taste of team awesomeness and how to start when you go back to work.

Who should attend? Anyone who wants to create a great team and build great products. You’ll leave having embodied the essential elements of accelerated continuous team-building and awesomeness maintenance.

This 150-minute session is a deep dive for people who want both an introduction and deep practice building awesome teams.

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Agile helps you to deliver what’s valuable to the customer faster. You can capture, prioritize, communicate, and deliver that value with good user stories. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. We have created a set of games that incorporate 80 examples of good and bad user stories. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then share them with your friends and co-workers!

Jordann Gross - How Black Stories revive Scrum meetings

schedule 2 years ago

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30 Mins

Tutorial

Beginner

Black Stories are ‘scary’ riddles where someone died in a mysterious manner and the players have to find out what happened by asking the right questions. The most obvious reason is never the solution, so the players will have to use lateral thinking to get to the answer.

As a summer camp coach Jordann played a lot of Black Stories with kids. He soon began to see patterns in their thinking and acting. The kids which joined the Black Stories multiple times, were often the ones who got better at thinking out of the box. They started asking ‘out of context’ questions which would often get the group a step closer to the solution.

He figured since these mental mechanisms work on kids, they would surely work on grown-ups! So as a Scrum master Jordann started using Black Stories to kick off meetings where creativity was crucial to get the best output (isn’t any meeting?), within Scrum mainly the refinement and the sprint planning.The results were noticeable, even by the people themselves. :) It also had a nice side-effect: people looked forward to the meetings and everyone would be strict on time, both things which weren’t always the case before. Let Jordann help you put the fun in functional!

schedule 2 years ago

75 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Agile teams thrive when people of multiple disciplines—software development, testing, analysis, user experience, project management, product management—collaborate to deliver great products. But creating—and sustaining—a culture where true collaboration is possible is not easy.

Think about it for a moment. How transparent are your daily communications with team members? What steps have you taken to understand your teammates’ perspectives about what hinders or accelerates shared success in your daily work? How often do you converse—openly and deeply—with team members, especially those who hail from other disciplines? For most of us, our day-to-day interactions fall short of the ideals of honest communication, mutual learning and genuine curiosity.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Join us for “Can We Talk?” as we explore techniques to help us share the truth—without blame or judgment—with our colleagues. In this session, we dig deep to explore puzzles, patterns, and possibilities for more effective cross-discipline collaboration. In the end, you leave with a set of activities you can use to safely yet honestly engage with your whole team.

schedule 2 years ago

180 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

Let's experiment with several creativity tools (a Ball of Whacks, X-Ball & Y-Ball, etc. https://creativewhack.com) and brain storm some ways to relate Agile concepts to this very abstract tool for creativity exploration.

We will create new never before seen games - using well known processes and new toys to the Agile community.

I have the creativity tools - you have the brain. Let's put them together and invent a new use for an existing tool, and a new game for Agile teams to learn old concepts. We will use several play frameworks; LEGO Serious Play framework will be overviewed and incorporated into our play. Also we will incorporate "Agile Game Incubator" workshop outline by McGreal & McCullough.

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

As psychology advises, an action becomes a habit when it is backed up by principles. This is equally applicable to Agile. We all know well Agile by being, not Agile by doing is a sustainable and lasting way of transforming groups and organizations. Then, the question is: how do we teach Agile values and principles? Would it help memorizing them? Most likely it won’t because it will be “doing” Agile without believing in them and making them our own.

So the goal is to internalize Agile values and principles, make them memorable. Share and elicit examples that resonate with the audience and help them answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

This exercise is being done in teams. I am going to share several games that help participants internalize agile values and principles.

One is a matching game with several cases specific to Agile and Agile Games conference. Then, participants will come up with their own examples. In the third iteration, we will have participants will “build on what is happening”, i.e. do matching based on cases created by other teams.

The second one is the lean “five why’s” game applied to Agile values. After sharing technique of conducting root cause analysis using five “why’s”, I will ask the participants to continue working in terms to come up with the underlying reason for each of the values and share with others. This is a competition with the prizes (laminated copies of Agile Manifesto with values and principles).

Finally, the teams will re-write Agile values and principles as they apply to non-software teams (human resources: hiring and onboarding teams), executive teams, finance, and others, and share their Business Agility Manifesto’s with each other.

In the workshop retro, we will brainstorm on other creative ways of teaching agile values and principles. Results will be shared with all participants, so that they can immediately use these ideas with their companies and clients.

I also have a 30-minute of this workshop which can be used as a tutorial to teach Agile Manifesto.

schedule 2 years ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Advanced

When most organisations start their agile tranformation, they probably have more than one coach running around. Once the initial spark starts to catch on, they often want to speed up the transformation. Endless hiring of more agile coaches is not really a sustainable way to scale and on top of that it hardly secures the culture change.

During a company wide transformation all teams and parts of the organisation will learn at their own pace, have their own challenges and run different experiments. On the other hand they are all operating within the same system and can learn a lot from each other. To avoid inventing the wheel over and over again for every single instance, we need a way to bring all their knowledge together.

In order to make sure as external coach you can secure the value you brought and leave the company again, you'll need to facilitate this. In this session I'll share a visualization tool which helps the organisation see how mature teams are and where they can learn from each other.

Michael Nir - Team Shield with a Twist - baby steps leaps and bounds

schedule 2 years ago

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30 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

You've just formed a team - you might be the scrum master, a team member, a coach or a cheese eating vampire, question is: what now?

There are many models to team building, however most are theoretical and don't give you an inkling on what you need to be doing and what is the experience required to mold a team - and whether the team would like to mold...

This easy exercise has more to it than meets the eye, join to explore the process within the process and add another handy dandy tool for team building, which I've been using for 12 years - never fails, except when it does - I am reminded of one time in a land far-far-away of North Eurasia, it was the afternoon of the second day of an intense two day agile workshop - the coffee in the pots was lukewarm, the Fika was generous and the teams' shields were in place since the day before and yet...; but wait I'm getting ahead of myself - maybe if we have time we can discuss the failures of a shield (not the one they use in star wars) and the work arounds - that's not a promise, rather its a suggestion...I also remember the southern luxury yacht engineer who was the only one speaking throughout the session; here I go again...

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

A frequent discussion within online forums and at agile meetups is how to hire the right people for an effective agile team. Many have commented that interviewing candidates using personally biased and possibly dishonest information on resumes, certification results, LinkedIn chatter, and assessment of technical skills can fail to identify good candidates. Imagine instead, you were able to assess relevant skills and behaviors supportive of being an effective member of an agile team using simple interactive games within a job interview setting. In this workshop, participants will experience a series of simple games designed to be used within an interview setting that focus on skills assessment for specific agile team roles, simulating real-life collaborative work activities and evaluating the human skills necessary to be an effective member of an agile team. Interview games use game play and play metaphors to allow interviewers and candidates to simulate work scenarios and then debrief on demonstrated communication abilities, collaborative problem solving, creative thinking, exchanging feedback, identifying ways to improve, and empathizing with others. During this highly interactive session, participants will work in small groups and conduct mock interviews activities to experience the sequence of interview games and gain hands-on experience in how to facilitate and debrief the games presented.

Alex Westner - How To Roadmap with the Business Value Game

schedule 2 years ago

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75 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Our roadmap doesn't make sense. Our executive team is out of touch. Why does the CTO keep going on and on about X, when we know our customers just want Y? Wait, we have a roadmap? We should just make product Z - it would be so easy to do - so what if it doesn't fit into the company strategy? Why are we not making products that our customers are passionate about?

You've experienced at least one of these sentiments before. Am I right?

The Business Value Game is a fantastic tool to align and build consensus amongst stakeholders on any kind of strategic or tactical roadmap - from product roadmaps, to marketing strategies, to devops initiatives.

I learned this game from Chris Sims at the 2014 Scrum Gathering in New Orleans, and have been using it for both feature roadmaps and product roadmaps, successfully aligning a diverse and stubborn group of stakeholders to work together for common goals.